Greedy Goblin

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Weekend minipost: Wildstar proudly announces... server merges

I'm following news about Wildstar, as I've been looking a more traditional MMO (where you get ahead by playing the game, instead of using EXCEL and programming languages to build charts) and Wildstar had a good list of features. I've never played it, but decided to try it out if it survives its first year without going pay-to-win.

However if you follow their subscriber number news, (example) you know that they are unlikely to live that long.

Recently they had a very bad PR lie to cover up a total server merge, leaving only one PvE and one PvP servers.

Guys at Wildstar, telling the truth isn't about "being honorable", it's usually about "not making a fool of yourself". Accepting that your core playerbase is smaller than you expected is just obvious. It would also be a good opportunity re-declaring your loyalty to this core, increasing their loyalty to you, something you need badly.

19 comments:

Anonymous
said...

the server merger is really bad PR, but what they are actually doing is acknowledging they are losing players because their endgame does not suit the core players (wich are not harcore raiders) and suiting for the casual playerbase that are actually their core base.

Since November 2008 all I have heard from the online WoW community (yes I know the problem there) are constant demands for hard content and attunements.

Someone listened and built them a highly polished game with rock hard dungeons and attunements and what happened?

No one turned up.

Instead they all kept playing WoW and complaining about how easy it is?! Logic?!

At least Gevlon switched games to EVE rather than continually playing a game that wasn't catering to him. Far better than endlessly complaining.

As I mentioned on one of Tobolds blogs, a decent sized Youtuber (used to be in a World first guild) who caters to the hardcore WoW audience ran a poll of his viewers prior to Wildstar launch and 70% said they would not even *try* it despite that they could try the beta for free. Bearing in mind this is occurring during a dead time in WoW when they have nothing to do.

I feel sorry for the developers. They did their market research, how could they possibly predict that people were lying en masse.

It is interesting that despite promoting themselves as a brutally hardcore game, nearly all the people that turned up to the party were casual players.

Meanwhile all the "hardcore" players remained hidden in the M&S "every one wins" theme park.

I'm sure some guys are sat in a boardroom wondering what they did to deserve it.

Do you have any evidence to suggest Wildstar staff were caught lying like you claim?

Just because they announced a megaserver for PvE and one for PvP doesn't make them liars, nor does their rapidly declining member base as they may very well have converted their normal server into a more powerful one to handle the load.

Why would it be liar's fault? Usually when you ask people what they want they say at least what they think they want.

I've played (and still get back to it occasionally) Neverwinter which used to be very hard for 6-8 months and it had quite a lot of players (more than now, with more pay to win and easier content). But at least there was an option for suckers to buy best in slot gear from the auction house.

I also read a lot that the levelling experience was terrible, dull, boring. This surely doesn't help. Just like eve after all. I thought I'd quit during the advanced career tutorial because it's really bad...

Usually game developpers say that a new player makes his mind about the game during his first two hours playing it. Well maybe they should work on that then instead of listening to people blaming hard content because all I read is that it's terrible. I haven't played the game but i also suspect a kinda lousy bind on equip/pickup policy not allowing trade to give endgame a high replay value. That's a game killer too.

Group of customers aggressively and at times quite abusively made strong and consistent demands for a specific type of content over a 6 year period.

When offered that content they elected not to TRY it. Even for free. They suddenly claimed they had no interest whatsoever and went back to complaining about how easy the mass market game they remained playing was.

It doesnt matter what the first two hours were like because they didn't TRY it.

Of the few from that demographic that did try it, their arguments are illogical in that their criticisms apply equally if not more to WoW.

I mean "leveling is dull"?

Really? WoW's isn't? Leveling in Wildstar like all MMO 's was a grind but it definitely wasn't worse than WoW and in my experience was more interesting because the action based mechanics at least have you doing something outside of standing stationary pressing 1,2,3.

One would have thought it would have been preferable to tolerate Wildstars typical MMO leveling to get to their ultimate fantasy end game than tolerate WoW's typical MMO leveling in WoD to get to the same 'everyone wins " end game that they spent the last six years crying about?!

Mega server isn't technically, you and your server mates are the only people in a zone, unless the zone happens to have very few people in it. It's an MMO, which are designed to be played with others. There is nothing more depressing to be playing an MMO, and not have enough people around to do whatever you want to do. Anyone arguing that megaservers is a bad thing is pretty much saying everyone should be more happy not being able to find people to play with in a game designed to be played with others.

On a medium populated server CREDD (PLEX) costs 6 platinum which is 3 hours farming in the game. On my low populated server it costs 10 platinum (it cost 7 in the beginning) and these prices are pretty constant, so people are buying a lot of them. I already have 12 CREDD on my account inventory.

After the megaservers supply and demand will change and i guess the prices will be around 6-8 platinum, which is 3-4 hours of farming with a mindless method (http://youtu.be/5YOHCufHAew), doing AH is much better of course (if your server is populated, mine is not, but with the megaservers traders gonna hava a kick too).

The game is pretty good, it's hard, and it should stay hard, with my semi-HC guild (3 Pre-Raid Events a week) we managed to get the attunement key for the raids after 2 months, now we can start raiding. People are leaving Wildstar, because they can't PUG dungeons for silver medals.

@Maxim - you made some statements about the tutorial and I'm curious as to how you compare it to the opening sections around North shire Abbey in WoW for example (the most commonly received tutorial in WoW I believe and not the worse starting zone by far).

WoW still being the number one game in its genre and Wildstar being a failed design in your eyes it makes an obvious comparison.

@WoodyWoW has a lot less mechanics to teach and does a lot better job getting across the actual world.

WoW tutorials introduce you to a slew of villainous organizations, makes you familiar with internal structure of your faction and challenges you with some fundamental issues that faction is confronted with. It puts the World in WoW.

The tutorial i saw in Wild Star is best described as a formulaic experience in an uninteresting mechanical environment. You learn almost nothing about the factions, their hopes and worries, and are given no reason to be the hero outside of "do that quest". Thus WIld Star fails in RPG part of MMORPG.

That would be okay if Wild Star's mechanics actually lived up to the dream of exellent and engaging real-time combat experience. Sadly, this doesn't happen during the tutorial section at all.

Personally, I don't see how anyone could have expected the Wildstar audience to be big, i.e. big enough to support the AAA development budget. Vocal and enthusiastic, yes. The majority on forums, perhaps. But a very small minority of the paying customers.

Currently, IMO, your obvious choice is ArcheAge. Just launching in the West so there is much opportunity to outperform the masses.

The old days wow world pvp, sounded to good to be true. the beta was my first punch into the nuts.Map layout was truly made with openpvp in mind. That's perfect. But they fucked up the pvp combat foundation of gearing and math. They knew it since closed beta, open beta and several month after launch. they hot fixed it mid second month. But that wasn't enough and ever since .. nothing.

The funny thing is wow 5.4 introduced allot of world pvp. And announces some pvp stuff for WoD that vanilla players start to sub wow again. If wow changes the item that let you attack own faction (basically making you a third faction) into a world wide usable item and not timlessisle restricted ... Then they will get my money. That's THE feature I miss in any faction seperated mmo.

Anyway. Wildstar did lie about pvp experience equally good as pve experience. And in their PR they talked allot about "no bullshit" company moto. Also they where kind of open and straight forward in bugfixes and agreeing that they failed here and there. So they really made a huge effort to suck doubts out of my mind. And making me believe their shit.

This Camie Chanlin Char lost at least two T1 houalers, poorly fitted with several BILLIONS of cargo. RMT?CCP'S RMT detection squads could so simply just analyze killboard data. If a suspicious gank is detected the account should be flagged for inspection...Just my two cents.